Our king summoned us on his great crusade to bring right to the northern world, and to avenge his brother foully slain by the treasonous Slavs. We followed him with glad hearts and high courage, willing to endure the vicissitudes of war to serve our beloved homeland. But we found little glory and much pain. By the time we had crossed the harsh steppes of Slavia, and reached the border of Wolfland, many of us had died, many of us had run away, and most of those left were sorely afraid. There was worse to come…

Just before sunset on the day that changed many lives forever, we arrived in a broad, cold, flat-bottomed valley after running the gauntlet of the most frightening weather I have ever known: an ice storm of unprecedented ferocity in which sharpened spikes of frozen water as long as a man’s finger rained from the sky, piercing unprotected skin like vicious arrows. My companions and I were among the last arrivals as we were carrying several of those who had been injured by the cruel ice. We were cold and wet, but glad to get out of the screaming wind with its cargo of flying death. King Steven rode among us on his great horse, Deathbringer, lifting our spirits us with his very presence and promising victory would be ours on the very next day. I cheered and clapped along with my comrades, but a still, small voice inside my head insisted that our great king was lying, and that nothing lay before us except more pain and misery.

I was helping to tend the wounded, and my friends were occupied in a fruitless search for firewood, when the valley was filled with the strains of unearthly music. It seemed to be coming from everywhere and nowhere, it chilled and heated the blood, it uplifted the spirit and cast down the soul, it was beauty and ugliness, it was kindness and cruelty. I fell to my knees on the ground. A hand shook my shoulder. ‘Look up there.’

I forced my eyes upwards and I beheld her, silhouetted against a blood-red sunset. It was the Winter Queen in all her glory, mounted on her coal-black stallion, and with the Diadem of a Thousand Stars winking on her brow. As I watched, her horse rose on his hind legs and stayed there with the lady’s hair streaming behind her in the wind, and dyed crimson by the setting sun. Then I heard her voice, as cold and precise as the shards of ice that pierced our skin that afternoon. It went straight to my heart and lodged there like a dart.

‘Here is blasphemy dressed in the clothes of piety. Here is the brother of an oathbreaker bringing an army to do war on the innocent and the brave. Know that this will not be tolerated. Your forefathers in Valhalla spit upon your names. Men of Scandi, return to your homes and consider your sins, lest the wrath of the Gods fall on your heads. You have until sunrise tomorrow.’

And then the stallion rose into the air once more before disappearing as mysteriously as he arrived. The rocky promontory stood empty, and the song of the Gods slowly faded to nothing.

Our king fell back in his saddle with a face the colour of ashes. Then he rallied. ‘Trickery’ he cried in a great voice with spittle flying from his lips. ‘Trickery and witchcraft. I promise half my kingdom to the man who brings me the head of that foul sorceress.’

Some ran for the cliffside clutching weapons and ropes, but I, and many others, had heard what we had heard, and our hearts felt like shards of ice in our breasts.

It was a long night, a very long night, during which the discomfort of our bodies mirrored the disquiet of our souls. We were in a bad way, with little food, no firewood, and tents so sodden they froze as we tried to erect them. Even among the rawest recruits, it was noticed that the king and his Ox Guard did not share in the discomforts of the army. Savoury smells emanated from the tight circle of the royal encampment, a great fire burned to warm the royal heart, and the sound of drinking songs split the solemn night air. The mood in the camp grew more and more restive as the night wore on, and when the lords who had come here to support the king went to the circle of his guards to beg firing and sustenance for their men they were driven away with harsh words and sharp pikes. Nobody knew what the morrow would bring, and many of us endured a night of terror.

I sat alone on the frozen tundra with the words of the lady alternately burning and freezing in my breast. I wanted to run away, but I could not. I had to wait for morning in the hope of seeing the Winter Queen once more – even if it cost me my life.

From The Barefoot Runners by  Jane Jago

This is a story that hit me right between the eyes.

I always remember the first time I saw Mumsie crying. She was standing there with tears flowing from her eyes and holding a knife in her hand. At the time I was, mayhap, still a mere young teen but aware enough in the ways of the world to know that a weeping parent must mean an extreme of emotion and a knife gripped in one hand could only mean one thing. She was going to murder Daddy.

I ran into the room shrieking in my piping soprano voice (I was a late developer), begging her to put down the knife. She glared at me through red-rimmed eyes and stabbed the point into the chopping board.

“Oh for fuck’s sake Moons, I’m just chopping the sodding onions. Go and do something useful. Or do something – anything! Here!” and she grabbed a book from the shelf beside her and hurled it at me. The corner of the book hit me between the eyes causing a bruise that lasted several days and after I had redeemed it and found a solitary corner of the lounge, I read it.

My review of ‘The Little Prince’ by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

This is a book written by a Frenchman who clearly should have been born English as it is the most translated book in the French language. Had he been born English it would have needed less translating.

The story is very sweet and cloying.

An airman crashes in the desert and for some unbeknownst reason meets a small boy who is suffering from delusions of grandeur. Instead of telling the clearly deranged infant to leave him alone, our hero befriends him and has to listen to a load of unbelievable tales about life on other planets.

There is a fox in it too.

I never understood the point of it.

Nil stars.

Moonbeam Farquhar Metheringham IV

You can find more of IVy’s profound thoughts in How To Start Writing A Book courtesy of E.M. Swift-Hook and Jane Jago.

This was not a pregnant pause. The sense of expectation was something altogether more profound and powerful. For most watching, it was like the moment when a giant firework screams upwards into the midnight sky at New Year, drawing every eye and inspiring the mind to speculate upon what exciting and marvellous spectacle of explosive beauty could follow in the moments to come.

There was a preternatural hush. The unsound of every breath held in anticipation, and for a few scant seconds, time was suspended into tableau. From forth movement, activity and life there was birthed a stillness which transformed the instant to a photograph captured by the camera of every eye present. Something wonderful was about to happen, a culmination and catharsis which was both long expected and yet in the moment surprising.

Standing alone in the middle of this captivated audience I felt only clammy nausea. The cold, sickening churning of dread in my stomach, seemed to drop like lead as if I was in a high-speed lift going down fast. This was akin to standing before the darkened radar screen of an air traffic control room and watching two points of light merge into one, flaring more brilliant, the second before it blinked out forever.

But, like everyone else there, I only had eyes for Roxanne.

She looked ethereal in profile, like an antique watercolour. Her hair the living copper shades that Titian craved, her face damask, skin with the softened radiance of fine porcelain or bone china. I could not see her eyes, they were not fixed on me, but I knew they would be as compelling as the sea, the colour of the Mediterranean, neither blue nor green but some special tone that ascended beyond those both and was all her own.

She wore white, a symbol of purity, innocence – and sacrifice. For a moment, when the red fell against it in a liquid splash of violent colour, I felt as if a blade had slid into my own throat and I couldn’t breathe from the pain.

Then she spoke and time returned.

Roxanne was smiling. People sighed, words broke the mirror of silence and there was even clapping as she lifted her hand to show the ring and cup the ruby pendant her fiance had just slipped around her neck,  so she could see it better. In seconds she was surrounded by a thicket of family – mostly female – and friends – exclusively female.

The sea of well-wishers, oblivious to my presence, washed around me like an incoming tide and my isolation deepened. It took me a while to realise that I was still breathing, that the world was still turning and that the painful constriction in my throat and the cold knot in my stomach were invisible to everyone.  I became aware that for someone in that moment, the centre of the universe was not Roxanne. Someone was watching me.

I did not need to shift my vision very far. He was close, very close, to where Roxanne was holding her impromptu court. Her fiance. His lips were addressing words to her fawning father whose broad back was towards me, but his chilling blue gaze rested on me.

They held no trace of triumph, no gloating superiority – in fact, no real emotion at all. All they contained was the cold dispassion of menace – a statement not a threat. This was not a battle lost, a campaign defeated. This was the end of the war. I had lost everything and had no hope. Life itself was without meaning. I was nothing now and despair settled into me, it’s vulture’s beak ripping the soul-flesh from my heart. Then, abruptly, the ice blue eyes shifted away from me and, dismissed, I turned, left the room and walked out of my own life.

E.M. Swift-Hook

Prunella teaches you how to cook like a toff!

Yes. I know. Unlikely. However, sometimes one needs to make the effort. Men can be very simple beings, treat them kindly and they will do what you require. Hence…

To succeed you really do need to move your mind away from salmon en croute with baby vegetables. And why is this, so I hear you cry? Remove your nose from whatever luridly illustrated cookery book you are currently espousing and consider the creature to whom you are wed.
If, like the Hon. Rodney and most of his chums, your husband is the product of nanny, minor public school, and the armed forces, he has much less refined appetites than he would like to admit to. Chateauneuf-du-Pape is wasted on him: give him own-label red from one of the German supermarkets in a big glass, or a pint of old stumpblaster, and he’s a happy man. Similarly with food. Do not waste your time and effort on some delicate, complicated, small thing on a pretty plate. He. Will. Not. Appreciate. It.
No. The way to his heart is beef stew. With dumplings. Followed by jam roly-poly.
Now you’re stumped aren’t you? Your cordon bleu classes didn’t prepare you for that one.
Very well. In the spirit of female solidarity. I shall divulge.
The stew.
In a very large saucepan place the following. Diced beef (skirt for preference, or rump). Chopped onion. Diced carrot. Three or four potatoes cut small these will cook down and thicken the gravy. Cover with stock (cube stuff is perfectly fine). Do not be tempted to add herbs, spices or seasoning. This thing needs to be bland. Place on the range and bring to a simmer. Cook very gently for at least two hours. After which add more potatoes, peeled and chunked. Add more stock to cover potatoes. Cook gently for as long as it takes to cook potatoes until they are good and soggy.
In the meantime prepare dumplings and roly-poly.
You need 2lb self-raising flour, 1lb shredded suet (from a box, do not be bothering to shred your own). Add two beaten eggs and enough water to make a softish dough. Halve the dough.
Make half into balls about testicle size.
Roll the other half into a rectangle about a nine by six inches. It should be quite thick. Spread thinly with strawberry jam and roll up. Liberally butter a bit of tin foil large enough to enclose and seal your jam roll. Dump the roll on the foil and seal carefully.
When the potatoes in the stew are satisfactorily soggy, bring the pot up to a gentle boil and lob in your dumplings. Lid on and they will be done in about half an hour.
And now to boil the roly-poly. Here is where grandmother’s fish kettle comes in very handy shove about three inches of water in that blasted thing and when it comes to a rolling boil throw in the foil-wrapped delicacy. Do not let the water come off the boil and don’t let it boil dry. Otherwise it can be safely left to its own devices.
Call your spouse to the table and dish him up a large bowl of stew. Once he is outside that carefully get the roly-poly out of the boiling water and unroll it from its foil coffin. Serve a thick slice accompanied by a jug of custard. From a can if you like, although the most brownie points can be accumulated by making very thick custard (no, not the eggy sort, the yellow cornflour sort) and allowing a skin to form.

Normally one would offer an alternative menu, but in this case there is none. All that remains to be done at this point is to either confess to the dent in the Range Rover, or mention the bracelet you have seen in a certain jewellery emporium.
Either way I have provided you with the tools to ensure your ‘lord and master’ is but putty in your hands.

I stand in the supermart aisle
The trolly beside me half-full
A fractious and petulant child
Keeps giving my one hand a pull
Whilst I try to decide what to buy
And the emphasis there is on ‘try’

The choice set before me is vast
With strawberry, apple and peach
Avacado, or fresh lemongrass
And blueberry just out of reach
Cocoa or vanilla or plum
The choice is just making me glum.

What? Rosemary mixed in with quince?
Or would I like kiwi and pear?
I’m sure that would make a good drink
But which is best for my hair?
Would it be too much to ask, to
Have a little less food in shampoo?

E.M. Swift-Hook

When Francesca met Richard they were predisposed by fate to like each other – even though neither of them knew it at the time. They were both blandly handsome, both successful, both good-humoured if a little humourless, and both laboured under the disadvantage of unimaginative parents who bestowed on their offspring the sort of names more sensibly found in burlesque than high finance.
Richard (Rich to his very few friends) Dripping was an investment banker. He was a whizz kid and a high flyer, if rather more risk-averse than his peers, who was tipped for an early seat on the board of the private bank for whom he worked. Francesca (no diminutives please, the name is Francesca) Phaart was a tax accountant whose forensically detail-orientated carefulness had already earned her a junior partnership and made her not a few enemies.
Quite who thought it might be funny to introduce them to each other is rather lost in the mists of time, although the best guess is an undeniably louche specimen rejoicing in the cognomen Francis Ffotheringham, who was rather in the habit of collecting people with odd names. In the end, of course, it matters not who did the deed because some puckish deity somewhere had decreed that they should not only meet but that they should also fall in love.

For a couple of months Francesca and Rich met every weekend, discovering mutual tastes, mutual interests, and mutual dislikes enough to persuade them that they were well on the way to becoming a serious item. With this in mind, Francesca took Richard to her family home in the Cotswolds, where her parents were favourably impressed by the rather stolid young man on whom their daughter’s fancy had lighted. Their only private caveat was his name. As Papa Phaart remarked to his lady wife in the privacy of their wide, white bed:
“Seems a reasonable sort of a chap, but I’m pretty sure he won’t make the top of the tree with a damned silly name like Dripping.”
His wife nodded wisely and passed him a digestive biscuit.
Two weeks later, Richard and Francesca were on an aeroplane heading for the glass and steel tower in New York which Mr Dripping, the second Mrs Dripping, and Richard’s young half siblings called home. By and large, the visit was a success, with the New York Drippings united in approval of Francesca’s bland blonde handsomeness and her placid uncomplaining nature. The entire family accompanied the young couple to the airport and waved them off with smiling fondness. However, once they were through the departures gate the whole American contingent burst into raucous laughter.
“Phaart. Francesca Phaart.” Papa Dripping was holding his sides and the young Drippings were actually rolling around on the floor of the concourse.
“It’s a very good job,” the second Mrs Dripping opined genially, “that Richard inherited his mother’s sense of humour”.
“The lady doesn’t have a sense of humour,” Dripping senior expostulated.
“Precisely.”
But none of this hilarity was apparent to either Richard or Francesca who sailed serenely towards the next phase of their relationship without a care in the world.
In due course, a reputable jeweller was visited and a diamond of suitable size was purchased. The young couple hosted a dinner party at a fashionable restaurant to celebrate their engagement, and Francesca moved into Richard’s home in leafy Richmond.
Certainly, Francesca was well aware that her name caused a great deal of ribaldry among those she mentally dismissed as the uneducated, but she could see no humour in it herself and nor could she quite understand why certain of her acquaintance seemed to think Richard’s surname a source of ill-bred sniggers.
She might have carried on in blissful ignorance, had she not been placed in a position where she could not avoid overhearing a conversation between two female interns at her place of work. She was in one of the stalls in the female restroom, in fact she was about to emerge, when the sound of two sets of clicking heels stopped her in her tracks.
“…madam Phaart,” the voice was loaded with spite, “and I suppose she thinks that becoming Mrs Dripping will make her less of a household joke”.
“You should watch your mouth,” the other voice was quieter and more refined. “You don’t know who might overhear you.”
“I don’t care. Can’t she even see it?”
See what? Francesca wondered. But she was disturbed enough to mention it to Richard over dinner that night. He shook his head bemusedly.
“I don’t know, dear. Does it worry you?”
Francesca shook her fair head.
“Not really. I suspect it was just more vulgarity.”
And that might have been the end of that had not the bank chairman called Richard into his inner sanctum. They were closeted together for the best part of an hour before the older man wrung Richard’s hand.
“You will think about it then, Richard?”
“I’ll do better than that sir. I will get onto it immediately.”
That night he spoke seriously to Francesca.
“It has been put to me that a seat on the board of the bank is being kept warm for me.”
She looked at his heavily handsome face and felt a glow of pride.
“However, there is a stipulation. It is felt that the name Dripping is unsuitable to elevation to the board.”
“Oh. So what will you do?”
“Choose another. With your assistance, my dear.”
“I don’t think it much matters what. Other than Phaart.”
He smiled his complete understanding.
“I am quite drawn to Smith.”
And so it was that, after a bit of legal sleight of hand, Francesca and Richard became Mr and Mrs Smith and enjoyed many years of happy, if unexciting, marriage.

©️ Jane Jago

You know the ones I mean.

‘Taking the lid off’ stuff we mostly couldn’t give a toss about anyway.

Every couple of months a dubious news item spawns a shitload of opinion/bullshit/dodgy recollection/psychic predictions/WHY branded as fact. And an absolute avalanche of supposedly revealing documentaries.

Don’t know what I’m batting on about?
Consider this….
The butler telling all.
Some woman who made a wedding dress pontificating on the bride’s state of mind.
A ‘love rat’ exposing the goings on in failing marriage.
Some body language expert deducing from a photograph that X is unfaithful to his wife.

I think you may be getting my drift by now.

This stuff is formulaic in the extreme. Choose a celebrity – or better still a family with some notoriety – and forensically examine the person or persons you have selected as much to their detriment/canonisation as possible. Season the pot with copious amounts of ‘expert opinion’, statements from as many ‘friends’, ex-servants, and people who once saw them in Walmart, as possible, and, if it still feels bland, add a few carefully calculated half truths.

Market it ruthlessly and with little or no regard for the feelings/reputation/mental health of the victims, and you have a licence to print money.

And whose fault is it? The fault of every bored person who watches it, every airhead who quotes it, and everyone who comments on social media. Me? I can’t see why the ever-f*g heck anybody dignifies this sort of bottom wax by watching it or talking about it.
Bloody well stop it.
And that includes me.

So I shall hie me to a strip club and feast my eyes on swinging buttocks – which are far less offensive than shite telly…

The Master Stonemason was in his eightieth summer and he was all but blind, still his hands knew their work and each chisel stroke was as clean and precise as it had been in his youth. Once he had cut and carved he began the laborious task of polishing, trusting nothing to the hands of his sons, or his grandsons, or the apprentices who watched in something like awe. When one of his sons would have intervened to help the old man, his only surviving daughter stepped in front of her brother.
“Leave him. Let him make his last work as glorious as his first.”

When the last letter was incised and the last square inch of the finest Carrera marble was polished to a soft pure shine, the old man lifted his eyes to the sky and rested at last.

One by one, each man in the yard stepped up and laid a gentle hand on this thing of beauty the old man had crafted.

Last forward was the Master’s daughter. Her homely features were shaped into the tenderest of smiles and she laid her cheek against the cool marble.
“It is perfect,” she said softly, “now come home to your dinner”.
The old man took her proffered hand and they walked away together – leaving the young men to carry the headstone the Master had created to its place on the grave of his beloved wife.

©️jane jago

One is often asked to do reviews of other aspiring authors’ literary endeavours and after over a dozen forays into those depths, one has now made it very clear that only books of Outstanding Quality will be reviewed. Everything else appears on one’s annual ‘Did Not Finish’ record – a scroll of shame where many who have thought themselves worthy now lie banished, with a brief sentence to explain their failing.
There you will find people like JK Rowling (‘a puerile effigy of urban fantasy, masquerading as a morality tale, but in drag’) and JRR Tolkien (‘anyone who has to make up their own language to cover their poor literacy skills is truly execrable!’) and Tolstoy (‘the summum-bonum of Russian over-saccharine emotional indulgence.’)
So you may imagine one’s complete consternation when deep in the throes of composition, the door to one’s inner sanctum was thrown open and the vision of loveliness that is Mumsie threw herself on the chaise in the corner of the room. She was breathing heavily and the bluish Gauloise smoke from her nostrils reminded me of some delicate mythical creature.
“Moonie,” she said with some determination evident in her tones, “Moonie you are at best a poor excuse for a son. At worst you are a complete fucking waste of fresh air.” She paused for breath, leaving me hanging on her words like a delicate bushbaby in the darkest woods. Mumsie continued portentously, “I have just come from the pub where I have had to endure the complete embarrassment of hearing other people reading the utter crap you post on those females’ book blog, and pissing themselves laughing. I was tempted to put my foot down and stop it altogether, but if you are going to teach you need to learn.”
She extracted a dogeared paperback from her pocket.
“Read this, you deluded bastard, and perhaps it will give you half an idea what proper science fiction is all about.”
Then she was gone, leaving behind her the aroma of Pernod and cigarette smoke.
One was about to consign the horribly insanitary book to the waste bin when her fiercely moustachioed face reappeared around the panel of the door.
“You better fucking read it Moons. There will be questions.”
And so I read it. From cover to cover.
And I am still none the wiser.

My review of ‘The Midwich Cuckoos’ by John Wyndham

To summarise:  Something happens in a very uninteresting English village. Then some women get pregnant. Then they have some strange children. In the end, things blow up.

The writing is absolutely plain, plain and black. The characters are rendered with such mundane realism as to make them even less interesting than the locality. I did not find myself transported in any way and the necessary immersion in the author’s world never occurred. The dour realism, the lack of magic, and a story whose point passed me by completely, all of these meant that in a normal situation I would have cast aside the shabby little volume after a dozen pages. But Mumsie must be obeyed. So finished it was, and reviewed it is.

All one can say is that if that is a science fiction classic one has no idea why. One reached the end as unimpressed as one was at the beginning.

No stars.

Moonbeam Farquhar Metheringham IV

You can find more of IVy’s profound thoughts in How To Start Writing A Book courtesy of E.M. Swift-Hook and Jane Jago.

One hundred thousand colonists don’t simply vanish… No bodies. No evidence of an attack. Just gone.
Ethan Walker likes his life as a freighter captain. It’s easy work with no need for anything heroic. That is, until a run to the Starlight Colony on the far edge of Coalition Space, ends with a shocking discovery.
Everyone in the Colony has disappeared.
The shipping company orders him to leave immediately and get his cargo back safely, but when he reports the situation to FleetCom, they tell him to stay off the planet and wait for them to get there. Unfortunately, that gives his passengers a chance to make a desperate play for answers about the fate of the colony.
He’s left with no choice but to attempt a dangerous rescue, even knowing that to defy orders will cost him everything.

The Olympus Dawn dropped out of cruise as it passed the outer threshold marker, ten light-hours from Starlight Colony. It was a picture-perfect sub-light transition as the residual photons snapped clear of the ship’s hull with the usual flash of infrared that swept up to ultraviolet across the forward screen. From outside, it would have looked like the typical hellish white-light flash of a photon boom, but from the inside, it was a wonderful phototechnic cascade of unimaginable colors.
“All hands rig for space-normal operation.” Captain Ethan Walker made the announcement more as a formality than anything else. His small crew had done this hundreds of times, so they knew their jobs. With only a couple exceptions, they’d be snoring and waiting for something interesting to happen.
“You just like the sound of your own voice don’t you?” Nuko Takata said from the seat beside him. When he glanced over, she winked. She’d been his copilot for over two years, and she knew him well enough to understand sarcasm was his preferred language. They had the ConDeck to themselves and she had her legs up and crossed on the corner of the console as she thumbed through the latest newswave on her thinpad.
“Marti, plot a course for the transfer beacon and set speed to half-light,” he said. As the ship’s resident Artificial Awareness, Marti did most of the real piloting and at least it wouldn’t give him any lip. Usually.
“There is a problem with that, Captain,” the AA said in its rich contralto voice. “The beacon seems to be down.”
“Down?” Nuko said. Dropping her feet to the deck, she tossed her screen to the side and leaned forward to look at her console. “It could be in eclipse but the nav-time says that won’t happen for another sixteen hours.”
Starlight and its co-orbiting sister planet Shadetree were some of the earliest exoplanets discovered by an old sky survey system that used transiting observation to find worlds orbiting distant stars. Kepler 186 was 178 parsecs from Zone One, but its stellar plane lined up with Earth, so a ship coming in on a direct line from the home system might catch the worlds lined up with each other. When that happened they’d have no beacon to use to get a navigational fix. The colony’s beacon sat at the barycenter of the binary planet and winked out for almost an hour out of every forty-eight.
“You’re sure we’re in the right system?” he asked, poking at her. She wasn’t the navigator, but since she’d punched the buttons last, it had to be her mistake.
“If it’s Tuesday, this has to be Starlight,” she said, shaking her head.

Wings of Earth: 1 – Echoes of Starlight by Eric Michael Craig